Like a virgin: My first evening with Halo

The Halo 3 beta is the first Halo that Frank has ever played, and he shares …

I never owned an Xbox. I was a staunch PlayStation 2 supporter, and I scoffed at the original Halo and its sequel. "It's just another shooter," I cried as my dorm room friends blasted each other well into the morning. I never saw the magic. Instead I preoccupied myself with other shooters—Timesplitters, Team Fortress Classic, Day of Defeat, SOCOM—never stopping to think about the Halo phenomenon. The first title passed, and the sequel followed; neither garnered my interest.

Eventually, though, after getting the 360, the question of whether or not I'd finally jump on the Halo bandwagon arose. The beta would be the big test. My goals were to spend some time playing in the hopes of deciding whether or not I'd jump on board and to decipher just what it was about Halo that had so many people obsessed with the franchise. I was finally able to sit down last night and play for quite a while, but both of my goals remain unaccomplished.

The first thing I noticed was that Halo is simply a shooter in tune with a console's gameplay needs. It's not a PC port, nor was it ever designed with the PC in mind. This is a shooter built for a controller, through and through. As a result of this, I readily noticed the general ease of play. Most of the weapons—especially the sniper rifle—are incredibly forgiving in their aim. Coupled with the gentle auto-aim, I can see why people like jumping around and fragging. The beta of Halo 3 is FPS made easy, or rather, accessible to the non-FPS elite.

Going from the pinpoint accuracy of head shots in Rainbow Six: Vegas to the easy shooting found in the Halo 3 beta left me feeling rather uneasy. Thankfully, picking up the game's Battle Rifle made me feel much more at home as I roamed about the maps picking off heads. It didn't take long, though, before I was circle-strafing, chucking grenades, ducking behind bubble shields and rifle-butting with the best of them—in contrast to certain others. There isn't really anything outstanding about the gameplay, but it's solid and functional and the sheer ease of play is a breath of fresh air: I didn't have to take the time to learn the finger position and movement nuances necessary for success when moving and shooting in Vegas.

I quite enjoyed the selection of maps in the beta as well, as they offer three distinct types of gameplay. A man-cannon valley with vicious sniper battling, a snowy base with an underground labyrinth home to close-quarters encounters, and a desert outpost with a mix of both makes for nice variety in play-testing. Vehicular combat was only really prominent on the valley map but didn't play a large role. Vehicles in an FPS aren't new, but Halo manages to mesh them into the mix pretty well: driving the Warthog around with a few other guys was admittedly pretty fun.

And what of the bemoaned graphics? Well, not having really seen Halo 2 to compare, I find the graphics in the beta to be perfectly acceptable. The textures are sharp, the environments clean. Character models are satisfactory, gun models are good. That said, the in-game presentation is not the best the 360 has pumped out yet, but, of course, this is only a beta. I've very few complaints; in fact, I think the interface and the beta menus are actually pretty sharp.

I could ramble about my little nitpicks and joys for pages and pages, but suffice to say that I enjoyed my first foray into the world of Halo. The gameplay certainly is tight, and I can understand why some gamers would enjoy it: after all, it's generally easy to play. Am I totally sold that this game is going to be the best console shooter ever, though? Hardly. But I will continue to play in the hopes of deciding whether or not I'm ready to take the plunge come this fall. Consider me interested, but still skeptical.